OLD-WORDS-L Archives

From: lynda <>
Subject: [O-W] not exactly a definition
Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 11:52:35 -0400

Someone sent this to me. Thought it interesting.

Ever Wonder Why?...

The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads
were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built
the
pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools
that they used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would
break
on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the
spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?
The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by
Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else
had
to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots
were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter
of
wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives

from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are

handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you
may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made
just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus,
we have the answer to the original question.

Now the extra-terrestrial twist to the story...

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big

booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are
solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their
factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have
preferred
to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from
the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the
mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is
slightly
wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide
as
two horses' behinds.

So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most
advanced
transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the
width of a horse's ass.

And you wonder why it's so hard to get ahead in this world...
--

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• [O-W] not exactly a definition by lynda <>